


Darling, Not in Front of the Bird

by lindenmae



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, So Married, peacock voyeurism, shameless married porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-07
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-04-24 14:37:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4923433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lindenmae/pseuds/lindenmae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames is 36 and retired, not dead.  He just needs Arthur to remind him of that once in a while.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darling, Not in Front of the Bird

**Author's Note:**

> For Inception Reverse Bang. Thank you so much to involuntaryorng for providing the artwork that inspired this fic and being so understanding about me waiting until the last minute to finish a 3k word story that I should have had done months ago.

 

 

“Mr. Eames.”

“Ah, there you are, darling.”

Eames flicked the butt of his cigarette to the ground and pushed away from the wall he’d been leaning against. He crushed the tobacco and paper beneath the toe of his leather loafers and deliberately sauntered to the curb where Arthur was straddling a humming street bike. Eames licked his lips and eyed the way Arthur’s slacks were stretched taut against his thighs with an exaggerated leer. Arthur only smirked at him and raised an eyebrow in challenge.

“You could have called a cab, Eames. Or Uber, or God forbid, you could have taken the train.”

“And deprive myself the sight of you draped seductively over that death trap? Never.”

Arthur revved the bike and laughed when Eames flinched. “If you want a ride, you’d better get your ass on this deathtrap. I _will_ leave you behind. “

Eames rolled his eyes but accepted the proffered helmet as he slid one leg over the bike and fit his hips as snugly against Arthur’s ass as he could. He stuck his tongue in Arthur’s ear out of spite before Arthur could re-don his own helmet, and only laughed when he received a sharp elbow to the ribs.

Arthur took the turns along the 110 a little fast for Eames’ preference, leaning the bike dangerously close to the concrete with two riders ready to make it topple. Eames clung tightly to Arthur’s back, more out of actual nerves than his original desire to annoy the other man. Of course that meant he could feel Arthur’s laughter against his chest every time he tensed or flinched. It was reminiscent of some of the narrow escapes they’d managed both in the dreamscape and in reality. With the way Arthur wove in and out of traffic and refused to slow down as the freeway twisted through the Arroyo, they would have left their pursuers long behind if they had any. But there was no one after them this time. In fact, there hadn’t been anyone after them for a long time.

Eames slid gratefully from the bike as soon as it rolled to a stop. He tried valiantly to hide the shaking in his legs, but the knowing look on Arthur’s face told him he wasn’t doing a very good job.

“Next time bring the car, yeah?” He grumbled.

“There’s a Dodger game. We’d still be stuck at Hill if I’d picked you up in the car.”

“I am not a young man anymore, Arthur. My heart can only take so much before it’ll give out, and then you’d miss me terribly.”

“You’re thirty-six, Eames.”

“Thirty-six and _retired_ , Arthur. These are my golden years. I’m supposed to be relaxing. Drinking cocktails in San Marino.”

“We can get cocktails in San Marino. You want to go to Juliennes?” Arthur smirked and bent over far further than he needed to in order to drape a cover over the bike. Eames wasn’t going to waste a freely offered opportunity to oggle Arthur’s ass, even if he was a bit peeved.

“You know I meant in Europe, Arthur,” he hissed. He dug into his pocket a little bit more viciously than was necessary and got the jagged edge of his key between the nail and bed of his thumb for his troubles. He sucked it into his mouth sullenly as he jabbed the key into the lock with his other hand.

“Remember the floors were just sanded before you take off your shoes, Dear,” Arthur called out behind him.

Eames took his thumb out of his mouth just long enough to flip Arthur off over his shoulder as he shuffled through the unfinished foyer of their Pasadena house. Of course tidy, modern Arthur had warned against purchasing the dilapidated mansion, but Eames had insisted that the character of the house spoke to him and now he couldn’t walk around barefoot in his own home.

…

Eames nursed a whisky as the sun set, barely visible over the large hedges bordering the backyard. He sprawled across a chaise lounge next to the empty pool in a pair of house shorts and flip flops. The plaster at the bottom of the pool was cracking and there was a particularly sad statue of some greek goddess, reaching out toward the expanse of the yard as the rest of her body was slowly covered in climbing vines.

“I know how you feel,” Eames muttered, raising his glass in salute to the statue. He was brooding so hard, he didn’t realize Arthur had come up behind him until he felt the chill of an ice cold glass against the side of his neck. He shot up with a shout, nearly throwing himself off the chaise lounge.

He turned around prepared to snarl and growl, but Arthur was standing there clad in only a pair of obscenely short pants and a grin, proffering a fresh tumbler of whisky.

“You’re not forgiven,” Eames grumbled, turning back around and folding his arms over his chest petulantly.

He expected Arthur to grow prickly and go back into the house, allowing Eames’ bad mood to turn into an epic fight, but by now he really should have known better.

Arthur just sidled onto the small edge of the chaise lounge that Eames wasn’t taking up, pressing his warm, dry skin all along the edge of Eames’ torso and thigh.

“Did you have a bad day, baby?” Arthur asked, and from anyone else it would have seemed mocking, and honestly to anyone else coming from Arthur’s mouth it would have _been_ mocking, but Eames knew it wasn’t, because after all these years he knew Arthur.

“They’re incompetent, Arthur.”

Arthur patted his shoulder and looked at him sympathetically, but the lines around his eyes were crinkled as if he was laughing.

“You think everyone is incompetent,” he said, one side of his mouth tilting up in a way Eames found both infuriating and irresistible at the same time.

“Not you,” Eames replied petulantly, bottom lip stuck out in a pout. Arthur smiled and leaned forward to press a dry kiss to Eames’ forehead.

“And that’s the only reason you ever agreed to work with Dom - my competence.”

“And your arse, darling.”

“Oh of course. You’re so very charming, Mr. Eames. I’m surprised you don’t have your clients falling all over themselves to do what you say.”

“They do fall all over themselves, but not because of any desire to please me. They’re simply incapable of doing anything for themselves. The future of dreamshare is bleak, Arthur. It’s in the hands of bumbling idiots.”

“Good thing you’re retired then isn’t it, Mr. Eames?”

Arthur leaned forward again, this time with his lips aimed a bit lower than Eames’ hairline. Eames tilted his head back to make it easier for Arthur to reach his target, already feeling slightly less temperamental with Arthur half naked and stretched alongside him. Arthur met him in a dry kiss that was far from chaste, pressing his lips intently against Eames’ and sliding long fingers into the hair at the base of Eames’ head. Arthur pulled back before Eames was ready for him to go and he showed this by lifting his head with his lips still pursed just to make Arthur chuckle.

“Take a break from doing consultations for a while. We’ll have a staycation. Get our house finished and then enjoy _living_ in it.”

And while everyday Eames woke up resenting his decision to buy a house that should have by all rights been demolished, when Arthur put it like that - with his eyes half lidded and his hair tousled and looking at Eames with so much love after so many years, well -  
Eames’ ruminations were interrupted in a flurry of feathers and limbs. His mind registered the sound of flapping, but not before there was a great beast of a bird landing on the edge of the chaise where Arthur had just been. Eames shouted and struggled to get away from what he could only imagine was some sort of re-engineered dinosaur, and ended up tits over arse on the ground, whisky spilled all over his chest and seeping into the waistband of his shorts. The beast settled and began to preen, making itself comfortable on Eames’ chaise, and now that the world had righted itself- somewhat considering Eames was on the ground and a prehistoric monster was in his seat - he was able to discern that his tormentor was in fact, a peacock.

“Bloody fucking hell!”

Arthur, who had clearly seen the peacock coming if the fact that he was standing upright and unharmed several feet away was any indication, started to laugh. At first it was just an amused chuckle, but it quickly morphed into something much heartier, so much so that Arthur eventually abandoned his own drink to the dry grass and bent at the waist, small tears escaping from the corners of his eyes.

“Oi, you think this is funny?” Eames demanded, scrambling upright and crossing his arms over his chest. The bird ignored him in favor of inspecting its tail feathers.

He pointed a finger at Arthur, intending to poke him in the chest, but Arthur grabbed his wrist and used the momentum to step into Eames’ space, still laughing. His cheeks were a rosy red and he looked so unbelievably happy in that moment that Eames lost all of his ire and melted into Arthur, wrapping an arm around his waist and slipping the tips of his fingers below the waistband of Arthur’s shorts. Arthur responded by burying his face in the crook of Eames’ shoulder and mouthing at his collarbone.

“You absolute prick,” Eames mumbled. “It’s a good thing you’re so pretty or I wouldn’t love you at all.”

“That is an outright lie, Mr. Eames.” Arthur managed to gasp between heaving breaths, trying to get himself back under control.

“Yes it is,” Eames admitted, smiling fondly into Arthur’s dark hair. Arthur chose that moment to slip his hand down the front of Eames’ shorts. Eames tensed.

“Darling,” he hissed, “Not in front of the bird.” And Arthur erupted into a renewed fit of giggles, leaving Eames with no choice but to hoist Arthur over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, ignoring the protests Arthur attempted to gasp out between peals of laughter as Eames hauled his husband into their house and up the stairs to their bedroom.

…

Eames may have been panting just slightly by the time he was able to dump Arthur unceremoniously on their California King bed. Arthur bounced at least a foot in the air before settling against the pillows with an ‘oomph’. Eames was pleased that while he didn’t lose his breath, the impact was enough to earn him a pause in Arthur’s incessant laughter. Eames loved the sound of Arthur’s laugh, but he wanted to kiss his husband and that was hard to do in the way he wanted if Arthur had to keep pausing to crack up.

Eames threw himself onto the bed beside Arthur, settling with his knees on either side of Arthur’s hips and Arthur’s lap comfortably beneath his buttocks. Arthur smiled lazily, one side of his mouth quirking up, and rolled his hips, dragging his hardening cock against the cleft of Eames’ ass. The sun was setting, washing the room in a deep, burnt orange, and the shadows cast by the trees outside their bedroom played against Arthur’s skin in a pattern that shifted with the wind. They made him look smaller and more fragile than Eames knew him to be, and he marveled at this other side of Arthur that only he was allowed to see.

“You’re so beautiful, darling,” he whispered. Arthur pretended to grimace, but he couldn’t hide the way his nose wrinkled with want of a smile.

“Shut up.” Arthur finally said, surging up to catch Eames in a kiss. Eames went willingly, pressing Arthur back into the pillows with the weight of his body.

Their relationship wasn’t a well kept secret of the dream industry anymore, but only they truly knew just how long they’d been doing this. Both barely out of their respective military careers and so very young. Arthur had hardened in places where he’d still been soft with residual baby fat at twenty two, while Eames had gone the opposite route and let a body that at twenty six had been all hard and compact muscle soften with contentment. It hadn’t always been easy and there had been hundreds of times that Eames didn’t believe it would last, but he could look down at Arthur now, gazing up at him with his hair tousled and surrounded by goddamned decorative pillows in _their_ bed in _their_ house and feel his heart swell with love.

At twenty six, he’d been young, dumb, and infatuated. Over the years there came respect and admiration and jealousy, but now any insecurities a younger Eames would have let fester were inconsequential in the face of his happiness. They’d done the impossible with Inception and they’d survived and they were still together - renovating a house in the California suburbs. Eames could scarcely believe this was what their life had come to, but he wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Eames slid his hands down Arthur’s sides, pressing his palms against each rib and stroking the pads of his thumbs along the sharp jut of Arthur’s hipbones. He tucked each thumb beneath the waistband of Arthur’s ridiculous shorts and tugged, lips never leaving Arthur’s. Arthur lifted his hips off the bed helpfully, allowing Eames to slip the shorts over his knees and around his ankles. Arthur kicked out, flinging the shorts off one foot and into some unknown corner of the room.

“Your turn, Mr. Eames,” Arthur said with a smile, already thumbing at the button to Eames’ house shorts with one hand, while the other slid up the length of Eames’ arm and over the curves of his shoulder to settle in a possessive clasp at the back of Eames’ neck.

Arthur pulled Eames’ face to his while still manipulating the clasps on his shorts, making it somewhat difficult for Eames to shimmy out of them, but not impossible. They ended up somewhere at the foot of the bed, while Eames ended up plastered against Arthur’s long, naked limbs, chest still sticky with dried whisky. He and Arthur only kissed for a while, entwined together and happy just to hold each other. This wasn’t some quickie in a storage closet while the rest of their team planned in the adjacent room. They had all the time in the world, the rest of their lives.

Eventually Arthur’s hand slipped along the contours of Eames’ back to rest on the swell of his ass, his index finger slowly prodding between Eames’ cheeks.

“We’ll need something a bit stronger than spit,” Eames murmured against Arthur’s lips, and Arthur chuckled.

“You mean you’re not ready to go with that stick that’s been up your ass all day?” He asked sweetly, and Eames huffed and sat up.

“Oh, you are unbelievable,” Eames huffed, already twisting to reach over the side of the bed and dig around in the bedside table drawer for a bottle of lube. “You’re never going to let that go, are you?”

“Nope,” Arthur replied, happily pursing his lips to emphasize the pop in the p.

“Well, we were in one of our off periods weren’t we? I was a bit cheesed off at you.” Eames muttered, dropping the lube onto Arthur’s chest.

“Because I hadn’t responded to any of the drunken love letters you wrote me.”

“You make me sound like a sad twentieth century poet, darling.”

“ _My_ sad, twentieth century poet,” Arthur returned with a grin, wrapping the fingers of one hand around the tube of lube and uncapping it with the other.

Eames settled on top of Arthur in a comfortable sprawl, not crushing the other man with his weight, curled over him in just the right position to allow Arthur to easily slide slippery fingers down Eames’ back and into the crevice of his ass.

Eames moaned a bit when the first digit breached him. There was very little discomfort anymore when they did this, both of them knowing exactly how to light the other up. It didn’t take long at all until Arthur was slipping three fingers in and out of Eames’ in an easy rhythm.

“Alright, darling, enough of that,” Eames gasped as Arthur dragged the pad of his middle finger over Eames’ prostate, barely giving him any reprieve before doing it again and again.

Eames pushed down on Arthur’s shoulders to right himself, holding himself on his knees just over Arthur’s lap, where Arthur was hard and patiently waiting. Using one hand to brace himself against Arthur’s chest, Eames gripped the base of Arthur’s cock tightly in the other and carefully aligned himself. He sank down slowly, enjoying the the initial pulse of warmth through his limbs as Arthur filled him. He leaned forward just slightly once he was fully seated, shivering at the feeling of Arthur’s cock settled against his prostate, and cupped Arthur’s face with both hands.

“I love you,” he whispered, half expecting Arthur to swat at him with embarrassment as he usually did when Eames said such things. But Arthur just scrunched up his nose and leaned up for a kiss, lifting his hips at the same time and earning a grunt from Eames.

Things devolved quickly after that. Arthur kept a firm grip on the base of Eames’ cock as Eames rode him, lifting himself up and lowering himself down with only the strength of his thighs until they began to burn and he couldn’t do much more than rock back and forth. It was only when Eames was near ready to collapse and let Arthur fuck him to finish that Arthur began to move his hand, stroking his thumb over the tip of Eames’ cock and around the head as he shifted his grip from the base to the top. It only took a few tight strokes before Eames was coming, shivering violently and spilling over Arthur’s fingers. Arthur’s other hand was splayed over Eames thigh and his fingernails dug into the meat of Eames’ leg as Eames clenched around him with his orgasm. Arthur lifted his hips and gasped, allowing his own orgasm to milked out of him by rhythmic pressure of Eames around him.

They fell to the bed together, tangled limbs, Arthur barely slipping out of Eames as he softened. Eames hardly noticed the crescent marks in his skin as Arthur’s fingers released their hold on both parts of his body. They lay there panting for a moment, simply enjoying each other’s warmth and afterglow, until Arthur began to squirm beneath Eames’ bulk.

“Babe,” Arthur said, and Eames didn’t respond.

“Seriously,” he said again, moments later when Eames still hadn’t stirred. “You’re sticky and you smell like booze.”

“Argh, darling,” Eames mumbled into the side of Arthur’s neck. “You are the absolute worst.”

“But you love me anyway,” Arthur said cheerily, and Eames couldn’t help but smile against his skin.

“But I have always loved you anyway.”

He rolled off of Arthur regretfully, sprawling onto his back on the other side of the bed. Arthur watched him with a smile.

“It’s a good thing we made sure to finish the master suite first,” Arthur grinned, eyeing the sunny, spacious bathroom that opened off their bedroom.

“Why yes it is,” Eames returned with a smirk, already sitting up and planning to saunter toward the clawfoot tub while giving Arthur a full view of his arse. Until he began to slide off the bed and his eyes landed on the wide open bay windows that overlooked their backyard.

The peacock was sitting calmly on the window sill, watching Eames with beady black eyes that seemed to know too much. Eames may have shrieked in surprise, falling back against the bed with a hand to his heart. This startled the peacock, which burst out of the window in a storm of feathers and decorative pillows, sending Eames scrambling for the safety of the headboard and Arthur’s arms, with Arthur’s delighted laughter ringing in his ears the entire time.

“I hate this house, Arthur,” Eames whined against Arthur’s shaking chest.

“I love it,” Arthur gasped out between peals of uninhibited laughter, and Eames had no problem admitting to himself that for Arthur’s happiness alone, he would learn to love it too.


End file.
